


Dogs Come Home

by Meduseld



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Ben's not doing too good, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, Supernatural Elements, written for halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 18:28:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11258493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: It’s entirely possible that Benjamin Tallmadge is haunted.





	Dogs Come Home

Fall comes early, and strong.

The wind picks up quickly and some of the older men in camp talk about bad omens, about teeth in the air. Ben doesn’t pay them much mind.

It’s not as bad as Valley Forge was, he won’t let it be. 

They’re settled this year, supplies plentiful. But he can’t quite keep his shoulders steady when Caleb squints at the iron-grey sky and grimaces. 

He’s looking away from him when it happens, the first time. 

It’s just a quick glimpse, a nagging thought that the body loping between two tents is  _his._

It had happened before, when the news of Nathan’s hanging was fresh.

He kept catching himself thinking that he’d been there, that every tall man was him, for just a moment. It had happened when his mother died too, he kept running around corners to chase the flick of dress’ hem.

But they were dead and dust, no matter how many large men or beskirted women there were in the world. He thinks nothing of it.

At first.

But it starts to nag of him, the feeling of being  _watched._

Bradford is dead now, hung from a rope like Nathan did, but it prickles, the hot bloom of weight between his shoulder blades from sharp eyes.

He keeps seeing something in the corner of his eye.

A face that looks almost familiar.

He’s helping unload gun powder barrels when he stretches.

And freezes.

On the far hill, there is a tall man, standing still.

He stares.

Ben stares back. 

“Sir?” someone, Smith maybe, says in a way that shows it’s not the first time he’s been called.

He turns. When he looks back the figure is gone.  

 

After, he can’t deny, to himself at least, that there is something dark about the camp, about this  _autumn_  and it’s not just Ben who can feel it. 

The men’s mutterings grow more bitter and biting. The horses are restless. And there are no cats slinking around the tents stealing scraps and meowing at the moon like there should be.

The ground grows muddy, and once he slips.

A man catches him by the elbow and when Ben turns to him he almost screams.

And then his mind clears and the man does not look a thing like Nathan Hale after all.

But Ben still finds himself reluctant to leave his tent, even with its icy drafts, to join the tense, nervy energy of the place.

He’s waylaid by Laurens once, and they tilt towards a nearby fire. The men talking around it make his hackles rise.

“It’s true! Bessie swears by it!” says a skinny, rat faced man in rags.

“Ah, come off it, washerwomen are more skittish than horses, Shaw” says the ruddy faced man next to him.

“And as easy to mount” says a third and they dissolve into guffaws as Shaw turns red.

There’s some rumor going about, some poltergeist in an abandoned shack or a witch between the trees.

It seems every town in the country has something lurking in the nearest forest, if you believe the locals. But Shaw protests, insists and even Laurens drops the pretense that he isn’t listening.

“I saw the lights meself, off in the distance. The land’s  _haunted_ I’m telling you. Th-” 

“ _Feh_ ” says Old Greg and hacks.

He spits an impressively large phlegm right into the fire. It sizzles on a log.

“Look at ya. Caterwauling like a maid.  _O_ oh _,_ the land’s _pissing_ spirits _, it is._ You’re a dunce”.

From anyone else the words would bring a fight.

But the man is canny, and likeable, and ancient.

He’s allowed.

“The Good Lord our God made the world more ‘n a thousand years ago. Been nearly two since his son hung on the cross. Whole time this land’s been here, being lived on and fought over by the red man and the brown man and then the white man too. Thousands dead on it and there’ll be thousands more, before Judgement. You think it cares boy?”

He pauses to breathe, rattling in deep in his chest, and glance at the faces of the men before him.

They hadn’t seen half the winters he’d seen.

Many of them wouldn’t see two more.

He looked down and spoke into the calluses of his hands.

“It’s not land’s that’s haunted. It’s the men on it”.   

 

He dines in Washington’s tent that night, with all the other officers, Greene by his left elbow and Hamilton by his right. 

Maybe, he thinks, madness tastes like Madeira. 

In the flickering candlelight, he can almost make out a face, reflected in his empty dish. 

It’s not his.

 

Five nights later, he wakes in the middle of the night.

There’s someone in his tent.

He can hear breathing.

When he realizes, it stops.

For a moment, there is silence. Ben lies still.

He can see a sliver of moonlight cutting the earth, the stained canvas walls, and nothing else.

In the darkness, something rustles, flesh-like, like the sound of bat wings. A heavy step.

His skin prickles, the air weighted like there’s a coming a thunderstorm.

There’s a body behind him, a large one.

In his mind’s eye he can see a hand hovering over his hair.

He jerks violently and whirls and sees absolutely nothing. The tent is empty. 

 

Afterwards, Ben walks the camp every day and listens to the men.

Every grievance, every plea, every joke. He orders, instructs, advises, checks and re-checks supplies, visits the horses, cleans his weapons, pores over Sackett’s notes.

He doesn’t go to bed until his vision blurs and his body screams and he is too exhausted to dream. 

And then he meets with Washington and pledges to kill a man in cold blood. 

He sleeps like the dead that night. 

 

When Ben shoots a reverend in the chest, something in him both contracts and expands.

As the man falls, not holy anymore, just dead, Nathan is behind him.

Haunted, rotted, ghastly, still  _beautiful_ and Ben screams.

It’s not a scream of pain, not exactly, but a hot rush of anger and  _feeling_  and when it’s gone he feels empty, scraped clean.

He tilts his head up, not sure exactly when he went to his knees. His eyes, blue and alive, meet empty black sockets, one ringed by faded burns and he knows exactly what to say.

“What do you want?”

The thing that isn’t Nathan seems to hear him.

Its head tilts, just a little, and something like slime slithers from the slit between the two swollen purple wedges that would have been lips.

“Do- do you want me to say that I’m sorry? That- that I…I-” the thing knows.

 _Nathan_ knows.

And Ben knows that it’s not enough.

You can’t love a corpse back to life. You can never put something shattered back the way it was no matter how many pieces you pick up.

Nathan comes closer and Ben closes his eyes and waits to die.

 

“Goodbye” he says, with a voice that claws up from the ground.

When Ben looks at him, he has eyes in his skull.

They’re eyes Ben hadn’t realized he’d memorized.

“To say goodbye” Nathan says again, the same hellish effort, and Ben takes his hand.

It’s cold, colder than the winds at Valley Forge, and not all there somehow, like all he’s gripping is a handful of knotted twigs. But he can’t let go, not with his heart so full.

The boy he’d let go because he’d never love him was here because he’d loved him all along. 

“It’s alright” he says and Nathan, what’s left of him, the bits that held on, leans against him.

He smells both clean and foul.

With his eyes closed the moth wing light sense of him is almost warm. Ben breathes hard, tries, wets his lips, tries again, sobs and tries one last time: “Goodbye”.

 

There’s the feeling of lips, paper thin, against his cheek, and Nathan is gone.

 

Ben leans down and presses his forehead to the dirt. He wants, more than ever, to go home.

After a while, he picks himself up and turns to the body. It’ll have to be dealt with, like the war has to. 

He has to go on, because it’s all he can do. 

(Later, back at camp after being kidnapped and shot and Lord know what else, Caleb is struck by how much  _lighter_ Ben looks)   

**Author's Note:**

> But then again there might never have been a ghost. I guess that’s up to you. 
> 
> The title is from Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon: “You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.” Sharper eyes might notice I cribbed, roughly, another excellent line from that same book.


End file.
